V-2nd. Pissing at the sun/: Ahab

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

In my Picador UK [Hey you Englishmen, this will be fun on Sunday, right?]
edition it's page 26:
 
" ... with some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good 
and all ..." 
 
This is obviously a Melville reference:
 
" ... I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."
 
(Moby Dick, chapter 26: The Quarter-Deck, p. 167, London 1963: OUP)
 
And Benny  - "Profane, fat, sweated." (p. 25) - IS insulted, because 
"(s)un beat down out of a cloudless, UNPROTECTIVE [emphasis added] heaven"
(ebd.) [Interesting, this is like German where we don't have the
heaven/sky-distinction and it's all "Himmel"!kfl], plus he
feels "uncomfortable" (ebd.). Of course also wg. Rachel ... 
 
No hermetic arts involved so far, imo.
 
 
Kai   

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> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:54:03 -0700
> From: markekohut at yahoo.com
> Subject: V-2nd. Pissing at the sun
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>
> p. 19 Seems to be astrology humor?...Don't know if it is almost as old a joke as astrology,
> but I thought I had heard a similar drunken pissing story back in the day........but
> I may always have been remembering this one???
>
> http://www.astrologyweekly.com/humour/pissing-on-sun.php
>
> I have always just seen it as a(nother) profane joke--this one directed toward the sun
> god, the god left by default, maybe, if the Sacred God is blasphemed--- if one wanted to play them ole
> kosmic blues again.
>
> What yu'all think?
>
>